Back at work today, which I’ll admit is a bit of a relief. Travelling does have it’s own stresses to be sure. Thinking about all that work you’ll have to come back to, not to mention things you’ve got to put off at home. Been thinking about php|tek 2006 over the weekend, and I’ve come up with a few final thoughts.

First, I’ll say that I did learn quite a bit at php|tek, but nothing that I was expecting to learn. My expectations for this PHP-centric conference were fairly broad. I had expected there to be a few very narrow, technical sessions with the majority being broader, more “this is where we are headed” type conversations. I did not expect many non-PHP-specific sessions to do me much of any good. What I encountered could be construed as completely the opposite.

The majority of the speakers at this conference were those either directly or almost directly related with the day-to-day development of PHP as a programming language. Many of the speakers were the originators of the stuff they spoke about, or at least had a hand in it. While this is truly a unique opportunity rarely granted in the IT world — to get to interact with the person who writes the language which you use each day — I don’t know if it is beneficial to most people who come to these conferences.